About The Role

Are you passionate about working with ingredients, hands-on cooking, and creating samples—and ready for a new challenge in your NPD or kitchen career?

As an inclusive, forward-thinking business, we take pride in our approach to New Product Development across Avara Foods and are looking for a highly competent and motivated NPD Assistant to join our New Product Development Team, based at our Dudley and Wednesbury Site.

This is a fantastic opportunity for a true "foodie", who loves cooking and working with ingredients with an organised and logical approach to their tasks.

Purpose Of The Role

As an NPD Technician, you will support the New Product Development (NPD) team at Avara across both Dudley and Wednesbury sites. You’ll be involved in a wide range of activities that help drive food product innovation from early concept through to successful launch, while ensuring the NPD kitchens and NPD factory areas operate efficiently, safely, and to high food safety standards.

Key Responsibilities

• NPD Area Management: Ensure the development areas are safe, clean, well-organized, and stocked with ingredients and consumables.
• Equipment Maintenance: Monitor and manage equipment servicing, calibration, and risk assessments on a regular schedule.
• Sample Preparation: Produce high-quality samples for customer submissions, internal innovation sessions, benchmarking, and presentations.
• Product & Data Support: Supporting the technologists with organoleptic tasting assessments, complete cooking validations, preparation of nutrition samples, requesting supplier samples, supporting during factory trials, uploading of NPD information onto the Avara recipe system/SharePoint and measuring product attributes.
• Ingredient Management: Source, collect, and store ingredients according to allergen control procedures, including trips to factories, restaurants, or local suppliers.
• Audit & Compliance: Support internal audits of the NPD areas to ensure minimum pass standards are consistently met.
• Presentation Support: Assist with customer and supplier presentations and be willing to travel as required.
• Collaboration: Build productive working relationships across departments at Wednesbury, Dudley, and other Avara sites.
• General NPD Support: Provide hands-on help wherever needed to support the Development Technologists and wider NPD team.